


Little Green Men

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [27]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, Government Conspiracy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 23:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4411814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She found him, her needle in the haystack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Green Men

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 2.01 "Little Green Men"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

When she'd joined the FBI, she'd thought it would be straightforward. They were the good guys. They would bring criminals to justice and protect the vulnerable. They would make things right. 

Four years later, she was communicating with her partner through a pre-arranged slate of secret signals, more CIA than FBI. A shiver of the eyelid if they passed each other in the hall. A particular lilt to the way he said her name if they happened upon each other getting coffee. A picture frame turned face-down on his desk. A trinket displaced in her workspace at Quantico. They met in the Watergate Parking lot, which amused her a little; it was, after all, so traditionally clandestine.

Who watched the watchmen? Who indeed were the watchmen? Her coat still smelled like smoke after her interrogation in Skinner's office. She was tailed by people she was certain would have proper credentials, if they existed at all. She bought plane tickets with cash and misdirected her way through the airport, grateful at last for Charlie's passion for old spy movies.

If she'd had to choose, this was not the tropical vacation she would have taken. Of course, if she'd had to choose, her country's government would have been upstanding, faithful, transparent in its choices, and working for the good of the people. Her sleight of hand with the tickets was child's play compared to the illusions that anonymous influences worked from the shadows.

But she found him, her needle in the haystack. She heard him on the day she'd met him, his tone warm and teasing: "That's why they put the I in FBI." If the X-Files had given her nothing else, she had at least acquired a reserve of esoteric knowledge and an eye for the way significant details masqueraded as irrelevance. There he was on the flight manifest. There he was in Arecibo, with a heap of papers and a dead man, desperate to find something to hold on to. 

"I fed your fish," she told him when they were on the plane. It seemed like such a small thing, after being fired at by what Mulder told her were the Blue Berets. As a military brat and a federal agent, she felt personally offended by the threat of so-called friendly fire, but there had been no time to explain their legitimacy, even if she'd had the inclination. Her teeth were still rattling from their jolting flight through the rainforest. 

"Thanks," he said. He held the reel in a bag on his lap, refusing to stow it. The flight attendant had already given up on them.

"You're welcome," she said.

"Scully," he said. "Thanks for coming after me. I know it isn't your quest. You put yourself on the line."

"We may not officially be assigned to work together anymore, but I'm not going to let you disappear without a trace, Mulder," she told him.

He smiled wearily, leaning back and closing his eyes. "Nothing disappears without a trace, Scully." 

Before she could reply, he was asleep.

It was astonishing that they remained employed. Wheels within wheels, she thought, but who was turning the crank? She would stay in her morgue. Mulder was banished back to surveillance, hours upon hours with headphones cupped over his ears, listening to the tawdry and the tedious and overdosing on sunflower seeds. 

The thing he had held onto had slipped through his fingers. There was no proof on the tape they had smuggled away from the observatory. "I still have you," he said to her in the dim of the radio room. The blank reel hissed with static. She squeezed his hand. There was nothing else to say. That they had pledged themselves to each other was a foregone conclusion; that decision had been made long ago, on the night the rain had washed away the barriers between them and epiphany had struck like a blinding, inexplicable light. Whatever kept them apart, they kept their word.

She left him to his lonely task, knowing they were not alone.


End file.
